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Category Archives: Social Media News

Here is a helpful infographic from a London based web design company that we are working with called The Website Group which will remind you of all the most important social media news articles from 2016 and 2017. The infographic includes news headlines about Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin and other social networking websites.

Some of the highlights of the piece are “college students used social media to help keep GunsOut of schools” and “Pinterest crossed the pond: Promoted PINS & MDPs expanded to the UK”.

I hope that you find this social media infographic from The Website Group helpful and please feel free to publish it on your own website or blog.

2014 has definitely been the year of the infographic, we are still finding that creating and promoting them is the very best way to get loads of traffic and high quality editorial links for our customers. Throughout the year we have researched, designed and marketed around 20 infographics in total and the majority of them have done extremely well, got lots of traffic and been featured on some amazing blogs and news websites. Because it is the end of 2014 I have put together this blog post providing some information about what are in my opinion the five best infographics we have done this year including details of the traffic, social votes and links they received. Enjoy the blog post and please let me know which one you think is the best in the comments.

1. The Periodic Table of Fictional Minerals

This is definitely our most successful infographic from 2014 that we made for the sheet metal website called Buy Metal Online. The infographic which displays made up minerals has had about 10,000 visitors so far, has 660 Facebook shares and has been linked to by well over 40 quality blogs and news websites. Two of the top sites that the infographic was published on are the Washington Post and Fast Company.

We created this fun infographic for the online dating website called FreeDating.co.uk featuring made up online dating profiles for some of our favourite superheroes including Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Peter Parker and James Howlett. The infographic did fairly well on traffic, got over 100 FB likes and tweets and got over 30 blog links. The infographic was displayed on some great blogs like Geeks are Sexy and Holy Kaw.

We promoted this Hollywood cars infographic in July of this year for the registration plate website called Simply Show Plates. The infographic is basically original illustrations of some of the coolest cars from movies and TV shows like the Knight Rider car and the Ghostbusters car. The piece has had over 12,000 visitors so far, got over 200 Facebook shares and 30 blog links. The people at infographic site Visual.ly must have liked it as they mentioned it in their newsletter and it also got featured on blogs like Broadsheet.ie and Mighty Mega.

We made this good looking superhero skin graphic for the skincare website called Beauty Flash in November and it really took off. The infographic offers information about superheroes with the toughest and most unique skin including a list of strengths and weaknesses for each one. The infographic really excelled in gaining links and was distributed on over 35 quality blogs including nerd blogs like GeekTyrant and movie blogs like /Film.

We launched this zombie-proofing one just before Halloween on the new shed review website called What Shed. The infographic has an awesome header which you can see above and then provides an illustration of a typical shed including information about the changes you would have to do to help make it more Zombie proof, such as digging a trench around it and installing a security camera. The piece got featured on the number 1 infographic blog Cool Infographics and popular movie blog Screenrant.

Here is a collection of some of the best infographic promotion guides that I have been able to find around the internet. If you are looking for information on how to successfully promote an infographic for your website then you should definitely check these out. Please let me know which is your favourite by leaving a comment or by posting on Facebook or twitter. Enjoy, then go and create great infographics and get lots of traffic and links.

An in depth guide to infographic promotion from one of the best infographic design agencies in the UK: DesignBySoap Ltd. The article is around 6,000 words long and is broken down into 11 different sections including The Importance of Content, Research and Design, Encourage Sharing and Engagement and more.

I found this gem on one of my favourite SEO news blogs Search Engine Journal and it was written by a guy called Jayson DeMers. The 1st part of the article is about why you need a great concept, the 2nd part is about effective design and then finally there is information about marketing.

This article was written by a good friend of mine called Tom Cumpsty who runs Sensible Internet based in Lancaster. Tom is fairly new to the game but he knows a great deal about design and marketing. The 1st tip: Link Your Sources and Contact Them works really well and is a great way to get links and social love.

An excellent blog post written by SEO and linkbait legend Mr Neil Patel offering five great tips on how to get your infographic to really take off. My favourite section is the part about manual outreach, you need to send out lots of emails if you want to succeed in this game.

Finally, this great article was written by social media guru Lilach Bullock who runs a UK based company called Socialable. I like the 1st part about optimising your infographic, if you include a search term you want to rank for in the title it gives you a good chance of getting targeted traffic from the search engines.

This link bait was published on the FreeDating.co.uk site on the 24th of May this year and is by far the most popular bait we have done so far. It’s basically just a collection of amazing wedding cakes that our linkbait guy was able to find around the web. It did incredible on a bunch of social sites and got linked to by loads of blogs.

This one was published on the Premier Holidays website back in December 2008 and everybody loved it. The post features 5 super creepy beach sculptures from round the World: the pictures are awesome. As soon as Neatorama linked to it the post went viral and attracted lots of links.

We put this one on the Master Cleaners blog on March the 1st this year and as soon as it got published the post set on fire. The linkbait is a selection of photographs of very brave or stupid people very dangerously cleaning windows. It hit the homepage of Meneame and Yahoo buzz and got plenty of links.

We put this brilliant linkbait on the Locksmiths R Us blog on June the 16th this year and almost all of the people who commented on it really liked it. The blog post shows pictures of 10 old fashioned and beautiful locks and at the bottom there is a video. It got featured on some very popular blogs such as Dark Roasted Blend and Mental Floss.

I put this bait on a web directory I run called Killer Directory on the 6th of August 2009. It is simply 10 photographs of tree tunnels: streets or paths lined with trees where the branches have arched over to form natural tunnels. The post did really well on reddit and got linked to by quite a few blogs.

This funny linkbait was put online on August the 9th 2010 on the RollaRamp wheelchair ramps blog and people on the social networks adored it. The article shows pictures of poorly designed wheelchair ramps that are difficult for people who are in wheelchairs to use. The bait did well and got lots of links from wheelchair bloggers.

We did this one for online electronics store Crescent Electronics and it went online on the 6th of June earlier this year. The post shows photographs of the World’s most unique headphones including antler headphones, Star Wars headphones and more. The bait was quite successful and got linked to by some decent gadget blogs.

Just been having a look at the Alexa rankings of some of the top social news websites and was surprised to see that Stumbleupon and Reddit are both apparently getting more traffic then digg. Have a look at the graph below:

The results are very close so it is hard to tell who is getting the most by looking at the graph, but if you look at the traffic rank for each site you will see that Stumbleupon and Reddit are both supposed to be getting more traffic then digg. Here are the traffic ranks for each site:

I am not surprised that Stumbleupon has come out on top, our linkbait articles always seem to get lots of traffic from the social bookmarking site, one of them that we did a few years ago has had almost half a million visitors from it and another that we did just a couple of months ago has already had 274K.

Up until a few months ago digg was way ahead of both of them in the Alexa rankings, I think the drop in traffic could be something to do with the site re-design that they did last August.

So about two or three weeks ago I was watching Juice I think and I came up with a couple of IMO really good social media yo mama jokes, since then I have been trying to think of 3 more to get my top 5 list and thanks to a bit of help from Mr David Towers I have them, so here goes:

1. Yo mama so stupid that when I told her I was on digg, she asked if I needed a shovel.

2. Yo mama so fat that when I told her I was on delicious, she asked if she could have a bite.

3. Yo mama so clumsy that when I told her I was on Stumbleupon, she said I took a stumble yesterday and grazed my knee.

4. Yo mama so dizzy that when I told her I was on Sphinn, she said I went for a drive this morning.

5. Yo mama so crazy that when I told her I was on Plime, she said I prefer oranges myself.

So I have been working on this air conditioning website and as you can imagine good air conditioner scoops are few and far between, so when Jeff the owner called me up with a bit of a story I knew I had to do something.

He found the story on a website called KRGV.com, you can read it here. It’s about some women in Texas who found an image that she believes is the Virgin Mary on her air conditioner.

There weren’t very many details really so I just re-worded it pretty much, blew up the tiny photo to a decent size and published it, you can see my post here.

I really didn’t expect it to go anywhere, I mean look at the image, it does in fact look more like death then the Virgin Mary, but to my amazement it did. The bait was just about crap enough to actually work. I got people talking about this image all over the web. Check out the discussions at Reddit, Propeller, Mixx and Plime.

I went to bed last night thinking oh well it’s not going to get any good links but at least it sparked a bit of discussion and sent Airconco a bit of traffic. When I woke up this morning and checked the stats, everything looked pretty normal, 1,500 from Reddit, 90 from Mixx etc. but then I saw Twitter.com 500 clicks. Now I don’t know a lot about Twitter, but that looked like a lot of traffic, my previous actual decent baits had gotten 50-100 clicks from Twitter at the most.

About an hour later I refreshed the stats. again and now Twitter had sent over 1,000 clicks. I decided to do a bit of investigating and found the URL that was sending the Twitter traffic: http://bit.ly/NVE6h, I searched Google for the URL and found Ashton Kutcher’s twitter profile aplusk.

Ashton Kutcher is a big time movie star, he was in that movie Dude, Where’s My Car and he is married to Demi Moore. He is one of the most popular Twitter users with over 2 million followers. Getting some of my work linked to by him is awesome.

The Airconco website has had 5,172 visits from Twitter.com so far and he only linked to the story about 9 hours ago – Link

Update: The traffic has started to calm down now and the post has had just under 10,000 unique visitors from Twitter.com, about 4,500 uniques that are unaccounted for and a couple more thousand uniques from other social networks. Altogether the story has had over 16,500 visitors and there are 60 comments on the post.

Around about a week ago I was happily stumbling away when all of a sudden this warning page came up, telling me that my account had been disabled:

Stumbleupon warning

Stumbleupon has been temporarily disabled, because you have used it too much.

Stop stumbling and disable stumbleupon toolbar

Do your work

Don’t think about stumbling

I feel really stupid now, but I fell for this thing hook, line and sinker. I thought that I had been caught stumbling my own blog too much and that someone at stumbleupon was messing with me.

The page is possibly one of the most popular stumbles ever, it was discovered about 8 days ago and already it has received 351 reviews.

I wanted to find out more about the page and who created it, so I used the form on the website to contact the creator. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions for me, but wishes to remain anonymous:

Question 1: How long have you been a member of StumbleUpon?

Answer: I have used stumbleupon since April 2007, So it is about 1,5 years ago.

Question 2: Did you create the page for fun? profit? Or both?

Answer: It was just for fun, I was bored and playing with new firefox 3 and surfing on the “about:robots” page. I noticed how easily the source of the about:robots page could be copied, I remembered those funny “stop stumbling” images and got the idea. I created the page, uploaded it to my site, added it to stumble and forgot it.

Question 3: How many unique visitors has the page had so far?

Answer: Here are my traffic statistics according to AWStats and Google Analytics:

AWStats – 101,789

Google – 89,901

Question 4: Has the amount of traffic you have received surprised you?

Answer: It was a big surprise to me, because I almost forgot the whole page… The last popular page I had: a joke about vista’s source code, only received 9,240 visitors.

Question 5: Have you ever thought about a career in viral marketing?

Answer: Nope.

Going off this page’s performance, I would definitely be interested in taking this guy on for his social media skills. He is not a professional and as far as I am concerned he hasn’t even marketed the page – One hundred thousand unique visitors and going strong.

You know how you get some people who just take to blogging? I was not one of them people. I started blogging for all of the wrong reasons. It was very much a case of keeping up with the Joneses. Many of my competitors were getting blogs and I thought that I should have one.

If you look at the 1st few posts on this blog you will see that I blatantly did not know what I was doing. I would say that I started to enjoy it and get the hang of it around Christmas time. IMO the Mixx review getting linked to by TechCrunch was a complete fluke.

Over the last couple of weeks a lot of the hard work that I have put in seems to have really started to pay off.

About two weeks ago, Lee Odden from Top Rank Blog added this blog to his big list of search marketing blogs and yesterday Liz Strauss over at Successful-Blog.com made me an official SOB.

Other blogging achievements include:

Around 150 RSS subscribers

Linked to by most of the major search blogs

Technorati top 25K

Over 100 unique visitors per day (without the main site)

Good SE authority – most of the posts rank well

Over the next 6 months I would like to achieve the following:

400 RSS subscribers

Technorati top 10k

200+ unique visitors per day

I would also like to start making some money doing this. If I can get this blog (including the rest of the site) making over £1,000 per month off advertising I can cut down on doing SEO a bit and focus on doing more blogs. I will start looking at monetization strategies this week.

If you have really good content that you want to get thousands of visitors to, then this guide should come in useful.

With social media optimisation (SMO), it helps an awful lot if you either know the right people or are active in the places where you are looking to target. Once you do or are it is fairly easy. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your good content and your SMO campaign, for once you find your feet:

Forget Digg: I know it has been said many times, but it is even more true then ever now. For nine out of ten sites Digg is a big waste of time and getting any kind of e-commerce site on the homepage is virtually impossible. The only people who look in the upcoming section are the digg staff and fellow marketers. Spend 30 seconds getting your free link and then move on.

Planning is Everything: Make a list of all of the social media websites you are going to submit your content to and then work out roughly how long you think it is going to take for your content to go popular on each site. For example with Reddit you can be fairly sure that if your content is going to go popular, it will do within and hour or two. With Mixx it will normally take a good 6 hours and with Stumbleupon you just can’t tell, so you leave that out of the equation.

Once you have done this you need to choose a time for when you are going to plan to have all of your submissions go popular. You might say to yourself, I want all of my submissions to be going popular 7 hours from now at 11.00pm. Then you add the time you need to submit next to each social media site on your list.

Go to work and do everything as planned. If you have submitted to all of the major social sites and if all of the elements are in the equation, then when the time comes you should be able to make it into the top 10 on popurls and you should be getting a load of traffic from JimmyR.com. I have had over 3,000 uniques from popurls.com and I have had over 2,500 uniques from JimmyR.com. If you make it into the top 10 on popurls you have won and you will generally receive over 50,000 unique visitors in a short space of time and lots of trackbacks.

Comment Management: Once you have started to go popular on some of the social media sites you can make your content go a lot further by dealing with negative comments. There are lots of different ways to do this and trying to talk to the negative commenter(s) isn’t always the best one, here are a few ideas:

Have all of your friends down vote the negative comments heavily

Take the mick out of the negative commenter(s) or their comments

If they have a good point, you might want to think about possibly changing your content

With good planning you can consistently get content to go popular on the social media sites, generate buzz and generate trackbacks.